Don't Mess With Mali - Part One

                There are a lot of articles circulating on CNN about the conflict between Israel and Palestine, but by looking around them I found an article about the French deploying more troops to Mali to help them combat the Islamist fighters coming into the country and then one about why Mali matters. The article listed six reasons and for my blog I will simply attempt to summarize them.

                The first reason Mali matters is the location of the country. Mali doesn’t have any economic value to any other country but it is a very large country – almost twice the size of France and so it has a lot of neighbors. The country basically holds a bunch of possible supply routes and escape routes for militants. This country seems like a Switzerland in the middle of everyone else’s problems. There is al Qaeda to the west of Mali, ethnic Tuareg separatists to the east, more al Qaeda problems to the North and sits beside some of the profitable smuggling routes from Africa to Europe.

                Ungoverned space was the second reason Mali was listed as important. Mali isn’t a country that is really governed and so a lot of extremist and criminal groups obviously want to nest their operations there because of that.  A lot of the bordering countries however, have obvious intentions to keep these criminal groups from setting up base in that country. Last spring, Northern Mali was apparently “the largest territory controlled by Islamic extremists in the world.” Everyone else does not want to see the rest of Mali turning into an Islamic extremist run country. That would make the entire country pretty much an enemy.

            Onto the next reason I guess; there is a possibility that Mali will become a site for recruiting jihadists. For those of you that don’t know, a jihadist is a part of the jihadist movement. Their objective is basically to try and free Palestine from Israel rule. I did a little research on it and only really found that al Qaeda is part of the group. All you need to know is that they are bad. Back on subject, with the French intervention, many people are worried that extremists among the Muslims in France that are originally from North and West Africa will seek revenge on France. (384)